Meth labs' revival spurs new police efforts

Holly Zachariah, The Columbus Dispatch

Sunday

Jun 23, 2013 at 12:01 AMJun 23, 2013 at 9:36 AM

The plastic bottle in the ditch looked harmless enough. So the teenager clearing trash with fellow FFA members as a community service picked it up and tossed it in his garbage bag. A fire flashed from inside. The Muskingum County boy wasn't injured last fall when he unwittingly picked up the bottle containing the remnants of a home-brewed batch of methamphetamine.

The plastic bottle in the ditch looked harmless enough. So the teenager clearing trash with fellow FFA members as a community service picked it up and tossed it in his garbage bag.

A fire flashed from inside.

The Muskingum County boy wasn’t injured last fall when he unwittingly picked up the bottle containing the remnants of a home-brewed batch of methamphetamine.

But what happened was a powerful reminder that the volatile byproducts that meth makers leave behind endanger people not involved in making or using the illegal drug.

And with Ohio law enforcement on pace to uncover a record number of meth labs this year, new fronts have opened in the war against the drug.

• As of June 1, all Ohio pharmacies are linked online, allowing pharmacists to see right away whether someone who is buying cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine — the key ingredient in meth — has bought more elsewhere, and if so, when. If the person is exceeding purchase limits, the pharmacist can stop the sale. Law enforcement also can monitor the data electronically, making it easier to spot trends and system abusers.

• A bill introduced in the state legislature would require certain steps to ensure that properties where meth labs have been found are safe and free of toxins before anyone can live there.

• Agents with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation’s clandestine-lab unit are ramping up efforts to train as many people as they can — including trash collectors, social workers and members of civic groups — on how to spot the remnants of a lab and what to do when one is found. Meth-lab busts in Ohio declined dramatically in the wake of a change in state law in 2006 to limit the sale of cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine, but in the past four years, the number has steadily increased.

Meth cookers use an easier recipe now, taking less than an hour to brew a batch of drugs in a small plastic bottle.“Making meth is easier than ever before,” said Scott Duff, special-agent supervisor with BCI’s clandestine-lab unit.

More people are cooking more of it — of that Duff has no doubt. But he also attributes the increase in meth seizures to law enforcement doing a better job of rooting out labs, a more-accurate reporting system to track labs that are investigated by agencies other than BCI and more public awareness of the meth problem, which leads to more finds.Meth-making used to be a production: It typically required crushed cold pills and a soupy mix of mostly common household chemicals brewed for hours or days in tubs, coolers and vats.Then, in 2006 the state took the most-potent common-cold medicines that contain pseudoephedrine off the shelves of drugstores and put them behind the counter. That law also limited how much someone could buy at a time.

The number of meth-lab seizures in Ohio plummeted from a high of 444 in 2005 to a low of 112 in 2008.

But by 2009, the “one-pot” method had emerged, and now Ohio law-enforcement officers see it almost exclusively. Meth cookers use fewer ingredients and generally a sports-drink bottle — they are the most durable — to make small batches in about 45 minutes. Police call it “ shake-and-bake."

The state tracks meth-lab numbers in a period defined by a federal fiscal year (October through September). In the first eight months of the current period, 575 labs were found. The total is on track to easily eclipse the record of 607 set last year.Already drowning in heroin and prescription-drug-abuse cases, authorities speak of meth’s resurgence with a certain weariness.

“It’s the flavor of the day,” said Pickaway County Sheriff Robert Radcliff. “It’s always about whatever’s easiest and whatever is cheapest.”

Sgt. Rod Hamler of the Fairfield County sheriff’s office knows that perhaps better than anyone else. Fairfield County’s number of meth-lab investigations is off the charts: 27 in the past eight months; nowhere else in central Ohio even comes close.

That’s in part because the sheriff’s office’s SCRAP Team, a group of deputies and officers from the Lancaster and Pickerington police departments, focuses only on drug investigations. As long as there are hours left in the day, investigators can generally ferret out some meth, Hamler said.

Not long ago, a tipster sent him to a house south of Lancaster. A woman answered the door with a 6-month-old on her hip and a cloud of meth smoke and toxins hovering behind her.

“Meth is so addictive, these people don’t care who or what gets in the way,” Hamler said. “They’r e going to make it, and they are going to smoke it whether the baby is in their arms or not.”

On the bright side, though, cleaning up after the one-pot cooking method is cheaper. Cleanup that used to cost as much as $2,000 a site and sometimes took days now can be done more easily and quickly by BCI agents and local authorities who have been certified in lab cleanup. They can neutralize most of what’s left behind and throw it away. The rest is hauled to meth-specific containers and later trucked away.

But the fire danger is much worse. Agents used to wear chemical suits at a meth-lab site; now they also have fire-retardant gear.

The heat and pressure that build inside those small bottles, and the chemical reaction that roils there, are tremendous.When something goes haywire, the fire burns at about 2,700 degrees, BCI senior special agent Dennis Lowe told a group of Lancaster firefighters during training last week.

“These meth cookers can now take everything they need to make a batch and carry it around in a backpack — a little hand-held, 2,700-degree missile when things go south,” Lowe said. “That’s kind of changed the game.”

hzachariah@dispatch.com

@hollyzachariah

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